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Professional Development Courses for Educators.

Jacquie Johansson

MA/ESA

Jacquie Johansson graduated with a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Gonzaga University in 1990, and for the past 24 years, she has worked for Spokane Public Schools as an elementary school counselor. During her tenure, she has dealt extensively with students of trauma and poverty, as well as gifted students and those from high income backgrounds.

Jacquie is the co-founder and vice-president of Continuing-Credits, Inc., which develops and facilitates dynamic workshops across the Pacific Northwest. Since the start of the company 14 years ago, she, along with her teaching partner Lori Gibson, has created and taught a vast variety of courses; the emphasis is counseling skills aimed at working with both students and staff.

Jacquie’s overarching mission, both as a counselor and an educator, is to produce classes that support knowledge and develop strategies necessary to work successfully with the entire spectrum of students and parent community with an end goal of constructing a safe, welcoming, and optimal learning environment for everyone. As test scores become increasingly important in the school setting, educators need skills to build relationships quickly and effectively with students and staff.

Drawing upon her experience as an elementary and secondary school counselor as well as an instructor at the university level, Jacquie is able to connect to students, parents, and staff. Her fresh, fun approach to practical problem-solving provides useful techniques that can be implemented immediately. Jacquie keeps current on new research, which she synthesizes with time-proven information to help educators structure a high-achieving classroom, and in turn, produce high-achieving students.

The student of today looks very different from the student of 20 years ago. Their parents do as well. The world today is a pressure cooker environment for both. Parents naturally want what is best for their children and suffer from what the authors of our course text call ‘Pressured Parent Phenomenon’ which is the constant anxiety over whether their children are as competitive as they could be based on their kids efforts. This class will help educators understand and respond to the extraordinary challenges that students face when dealing with enormous pressure and parental expectations. You will learn strategies that will help you understand and work more effectively with stressed out students and their pressured parents.

Many girls are staggering under the pressure of jam-packed schedules, hours of homework, heightened expectations, demanding social lives and far too little sleep. Maturing into a successful young woman is full of stressors, and girls in this generation are pioneers in learning how to make it all work and still become successful both inside and outside of the classroom. Their anxiety level is only heightened by the unrealistic standard of what it means to “have it all.” This class is designed to help you understand the new culture of girls today as well as strategies for helping them achieve their dreams.

Most students experience some form of loss in their lives, and the grief that results can profoundly affect their academic performance, emotional stability, and social interactions. This class will help educators understand and respond to the extraordinary challenges that children may face when dealing with grief and loss. Participants will learn strategies to help students affected by divorce, the death of a parent, relative, friend, or pet; violence; chronic illness, and more. This class will examine grief experiences at different developmental levels and will give you strategies to:
1. Respond appropriately to expressions of grief from children and adolescents
2. Help students handle some of the emotions associated with loss
3. Determine when to refer a child to a specialist
4. Respect cultural attitudes towards grief and loss
5. Understand and identify risk taking behaviors and suicide
This course is appropriate for those working in all grades, K-12 including teachers, para-educators, counselors, and other support personnel.

Learn powerful communication skills and successful strategies for working with challenging colleagues. You will learn the 10 specific behaviors that represent people at their worst and the underlying causes of these behaviors. Also, learn how to bring out the best in people when they are at their worst. Become proficient at understanding motivating issues behind unwanted behavior. You will uncover insights about yourself and your work place. Appropriate for teachers K-12, administrators and support staff.

Elementary teachers! Become a technology leader for your professional team and inspire your students. Develop lessons using free online curriculum-rich resources that will engage students in every core subject. Not only will you learn to access an amazing amount of online resources, you will learn new innovative ways to apply them to your current professional assignment.

Enhance your K-12 Civil War teaching using the books and videos suggested in this course. This innovative course includes a resource file on the Civil War featuring web pages with interactive maps, lesson plans, art, music, reenactment videos, and lectures from leading scholars. Teachers will find ways to actively engage students around many of the major themes and events of this time period.

This course is based on the required text, "Qualities of Effective Teachers" by James Stronge. Stronge’s work emphasizes that the classroom teacher is a person that makes the biggest difference in studies of effectiveness. Also covered are classroom management, curriculum development, lesson delivery. follow-up checklists and ‘red flags’ of ineffective teaching.